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Articles from Vol. 37, No. 5, September-October

2012 Reader Survey Results

Based on Moment's 2012 reader survey, President Barack Obama will receive the vast majority of the Jewish vote, which is consistent with traditional Jewish voting patterns. His lead, however, could be smaller than last time around. Our survey, conducted...

America before Religious Freedom: Until the Separation of Church and State, the Colonies Were a Hotbed of Persecution

If opinion polls on religion and politics are accurate, the American public reached a turning point last March, in the heat of the Republican primaries. For the first time in the 12 years that the Pew Research Center has been surveying attitudes, a...

An Occasional Feature Where Momenteers Unaccustomed to Luxury Travel the World

For me a visit to Israel has always meant roughing it, so it caine as a surprise to discover that Israel has long been a premier luxury destination. I learned this as soon as I slipped into the stately Old World lobby of Haifa's Dan Cannel and was...

As a Kid, I Fantasized about a Time Machine That Would Return Me to the Old World

Growing up in a small New Jersey town, I was a girl without a family history. I was the descendant of courageous individuals who had left their families behind in Eastern Europe and started over in the U.S., but rarely spoke of the past. My father's...

Does Birth Control Trump Israel? Republicans Have Made Israel Their Wedge Issue. Democrats Should Make Women's Rights Theirs

The Republicans, to their everlasting disgrace, have made Israel a wedge issue, reversing decades of political bipartisanship by casting President Obama as inadequately supportive of the Jewish state. This, despite the fact that Israel's Minister of...

Located at the geographic crossroads Asia, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Israel is a kettle of culinary confluence. Perhaps the best embodiment of the global influence on contemporary Israeli cuisine is the humble sabich. [ILLUSTRATION...

INDEPENDENT Democracy is not a Jewish idea. In fact, it falls short of the Jewish idea. We unanimously accepted the guidance of Torah at Sinai (Exodus 24:3 and 7) and committed ourselves to its system of social, economic and national law--thus,...

Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country--and Why They Can't Make Peace Patrick Tyler Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012, $35.00, pp. 576 In October 2000, several weeks and scores of deaths after the Second...

In the beginning, God placed a rainbow in the sky as a string around the finger: a biblical memory prompt. "I will remember My covenant between Me and you and every living being among all flesh," God says in the book of Genesis. Jewish memory is...

Telegraph Avenue Michael Chabon Harper 2012, $27.99, pp. 465 The most perilous pitfall for a tour de force is that the tour can come off as forced. Alas, Telegraph Avenue, a lengthy opus of virtuosic language and ambitious, potentially...

Stuart Eizenstat and Samuel Dubbin Have Very Different Points of View about How to Handle Holocaust Insurance Claims

THE ISSUE Travel in Jewish circles these days and you are likely to hear bitter disagreement over how to handle decades-old insurance claims, a controversy that has torn apart friendships and pitted some Holocaust survivors against other survivors,...

Surprise, Politics and Religion Don't Mix: Americans Are Tired of Politicians Who Wear Their Religion on Their Sleeves

In the mid-1980s I accompanied then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to a ceremony where a mezuzah was placed at the entrance of the newly purchased Jewish War Veterans building in Washington. As we drove to the site, I took out a selection of six...

From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 John Connelly Harvard University Press 2012, $35, pp. 384 Sometime in my mid-teens, I asked to join the CYO basketball team at the parish church in my New...

The Jewish Presidential Candidate You Don't Know: You Won't See Her in the Debates. but the Green Party's Jill Stein Has a Lot to Say

Did your Jewish upbringing lead you to politics? I was brought up in a Reform synagogue in a community north of Chicago. My grandparents had been refugees from pogroms, so we were very mindful of issues surrounding the Holocaust, human rights and...

The New Normal: Swift Acceptance of Gays by the Israeli Military Helped Transform Israel into One of the Most Gay-Friendly Countries in the World

IN THE MID-1980S, A FORMER EL AL FLIGHT ATTENDANT FROM THE SMALL COASTAL TOWN OF HADERA BEGAN WRITING A FAIRY TALE ABOUT THE LIFE HE DREAMED OF LIVING IN ISRAEL. IT TOOK THE FORM OF A WEEKLY COLUMN IN THE WIDELY READ HAIR [THE CITY], A VILLAGE VOICE-LIKE...

The Reinvention of Thomas Jefferson: Did This Founding Father Really Intend for the U.S. to Be a Christian Nation?

The religious right insists that the United States was founded as a Christian nation based on biblical principles. A chief obstacle to this claim is Thomas Jefferson, the most eloquent champion among the founding fathers of strict separation of church...

A plaque at the entrance to Istanbul's Jewish Museum bears a series of statements in which five successive leaders of the Turkish Republic--from its aggressively secular founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 up through 1997--declare appreciation and...